Between Us
by wordspank
Summary: A collection of memories, thoughts, and imagined moments about Klaus and Caroline, past and future.
1. Track 1: Maya On Plane

**Note: **As the writing for this serves as a companion to music I picked and graphics I created, it'd be better if you hopped on over to my_ wordspank _tumblr for the full experience.

This series will be broken down by song tracks and released in that order. Its parts will not be written chronologically. Some of the writing follows canon closely, and some things I've taken liberties with. Parts of it are sweet, other bits, violent. I'll change the rating as it goes. A few are drabbles, a couple are full length fic. I just wanted to work on something slightly different. Thanks for reading!

* * *

Arm in arm they walk.

They're in a space where nobody believes can exist. For they say Klaus is lonely, angry, and a terrible friend to have, caught in his cycle of revenge, reducing himself to a black hole of soul-sucking paranoia and insecurity. They say if he drowns, you descend with him. Everyone keeps telling her that she's wasting her time trying to fix a broken thing.

But she isn't trying to. Caroline sees all the pieces in shards and dust, and the only thing she wants to do is trace her fingers through it, feeling like she _knows_ him. When she glimpses the damage, all she sees the outline of her own reflection.

Klaus glances downward, realizing that her hand, in the crook of his elbow, is not quite settled. "Here," he says, dropping his arm to let her slide her hand into his. It makes her pause for a second, but she allows it, to savour the moment before they part ways, maybe for months. Maybe for years.

So she enjoys the space they share together. _Their space, _where nothing needs to be said and everything can be _felt. _The quiet energy between them warms, twists, melds. Monster, the world warns her. But it surprises her how comforting he can actually be. _He's her monster._

* * *

At the door, she stops holding his hand. What should've been a hollow emptiness Klaus has prepared himself for is filled up with light when she turns to him, looks him in the eye and says,

"Thank you,"

like she means it from the bottom of her heart. She doesn't say anything more, but he can hear the rest of it clear as the night sky they walk under - _for everything_.

Thank you for everything.

Time, life, distance. Separation. The world fails to recognize is that all the things that try to tear them apart only brings them closer together.

He smiles. She returns it with one of her own. Anything else will feel like a goodbye, and neither of them will have that tonight.


	2. Track 2: Lessons

_I've tried to stop thinking about you. And I can't._

It runs through her mind, padded by the beat of her heart in her ears.

Again and again. The foreign sound of what he's saying, knowing what it means, but not fully understanding his use of it. There's the _why, _but more importantly, the _so what?_

Caroline hears it echoing in her ears. She feels something happening as she babbles a reply. Something that never quite goes away even after all's said and done; it lingers like the smell of a person who's slept too many nights in her bed.

There comes a day when she isn't so sure if it's what he really said that bothered her for years - even if it hadn't actually been _him._

They weren't his words after all.

Is it still the same now? She doesn't know. Sometimes she forgets. On a good day, she goes on without slipping into reminiscence, but it's only because her mind is _preoccupied_.

Then she finds herself alone, and it starts.

The flit of an image; the lick of sweat off his back; the smell of that coat; the taste of his blood journeying from the corner of her mouth, beneath her ear, to the back of her neck. And his breathing. Just the soft rise and ebb of him, returning life back to her. What was once his became hers.

_I've tried to stop thinking about you. And I can't._

Caroline closes her eyes, bitter. Not because it keeps resurfacing, but because she doesn't know – because she'll never know – if she'll ever hear the words leave his lips again, the same way she doesn't know how he ended up so deep under her skin.


	3. Track 3: This Is What It Feels Like

Paper crunched; black velvet, scratched; silver, tarnished. They tumble from her warm hands into old cardboard.

Caroline dumps it all, and reaches for the lighter.

* * *

Every single thing that reminds her of him, she digs up. From her drawers, from her wardrobe, off the tiny brass stand sitting on her dresser. There are not as many as she thought, but enough to forge a mosaic of memory that swirls about her insides in chipped and broken pieces. Enough to cause chaos.

They crowd around her on the bed, laid out like a map of his love for her.

Drawings. She lifts a yellowed page, feels her heart respond with a pinch. It takes so little to make her feel worshipped, and she's disappointed that she loses herself so easily on his pedestal.

It's just graphite and pulp.

Her fingers bend inwards, taking the corner of the picture with them. She squeezes until her knuckles go white, until the beautifully smudged contour of her own image marks her palm; until she folds in the rest of the paper with both hands pressed together, crushing.

It rolls off her palm into the box. Throws in the rest of the pages.

Nothing about her mood improves.

The velvet box is not as precious. Neither is the bracelet in it, returned to her a day after she'd flung it away from her like it was poison. She keeps telling herself this, as she runs a finger over the jeweled bow shapes, every glitter like refracted sun through crystal tears.

None of this is important. In it goes, into the box.

A dress. Grey tuelle, the encrusted waist. The ghost of his hand upon it makes her smooth a thumb over the fabric, her other hand a clenched fistful of silk fibers. One-time wear, she rationalizes. Dispose.

Last one. It's in her lap the whole time, the one she almost forgets. Soft, ordinary, she looks at the plain black cotton top and lifts it up closer to her face, knowing exactly where the spot of his blood had fallen. Twenty washes later and she still knows.

It floods her, his vigor, the recollection coiling around her like white smoke, seducing, claiming. He held her. He offered himself. And Caroline bit, as Eve might have had with the serpent watching, knowing what it was like to be truly _saved _and at the same time entering a most damning fate_._ It was the only second chance that anyone ever gave her.

A girl never forgets her first.

And this is what makes her hesitate. Her throat tightens and her hand hovers, slow to drape the cotton top over the edge of the box that's barely half full. He's in her now - and he will be, long after the memories are nothing but soot and rags.

So Caroline tips over the box and tosses her dainty little zippo aside.

_Do what you will with your scars. You remember their pain all the same._

She buries her face in her pillow, and prays, _please, stop the longing. I need to move on._


	4. Track 4: The Fragile

_Mystic Grill._

"They don't serve what I want." Caroline flips the menu. "Or maybe," she scans the full list of assorted drinks to test her liver with. "What would you recommend?"

Stefan leans forward and anchors a finger to the laminated surface without looking. "This one."

"Bacardi. Vodka. Gin. Tequila. Whiskey. Beer. Stout." Her brows rise. "Okay. I like variety."

Three minutes later, an aptly named Graveyard arrives in a frosted mug, black as the blazer she's wearing. Stefan has water, much to her disdain.

"All about the straightedge, I see," she quips, but it seems like he isn't interested in the small talk. "We're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about why you called me down here." Then he waits for her answer.

She can't give it. She takes the thin red straw into her mouth and drinks, inhaling deep and long like she would with the bar's stale air to centre herself. The dark concoction scurries straight into her belly, both hot and nearly spicy despite the column of fracturing ice in the centre of the sweating glass. It's none as tasty as her regular fruit-garnished tipples of choice, but if it helps loosen her tongue and the iron cage of her heart, she'll have it by the jug.

Locking his fingers together in front of him, Stefan attempts another emotional breach. "Are you okay?" he asks.

_Just say what you feel. No, not really, but yes, I'm still standing. On the flat of my shoulders sit a burden, something - no, someone - that has spent the years digging claws into my temples, so severe that even the ghost of his shadow still ripples through bone and blood. Yet here I am. Carrying it with my head barely above the water._

"I don't know," Caroline says. She knows very well that he can't help her if she doesn't tell him where it hurts. (Everywhere, probably.)

Stefan leans back into his seat, quiet. He eyes her as he allows her reply to steep and take hold. Then the waitress crosses their table, and he stops her with a lift of his wrist.

"Get me a Graveyard," he says, keeping his gaze on Caroline. "And a bottle of vodka for my friend."

The blonde lowers her head and sips. Sips again, so that maybe each time she fuels up on liquid courage the truth will come by more easily. But it never comes, and the two vampires continue to sit, littering their booth with bottles until dawn cracks the sky, talking about everything except what she asked him to be here for.

* * *

_Salvatore Residence._

This is hardly her favourite place to be.

"What do you want?"

A Salvatore brother she'd prefer to see less of, clutches his usual glass of whiskey. No Elena, no niceties. The true visage of Damon, the one that Caroline is most comfortable with. She has all the freedom to deck his smug face in whenever she deems it appropriate.

"Your girlfriend says that I have to iron out my issues with you," she replies, with some resignation in her voice. _Because I care about what she feels.  
_

The icy blue irises light up at her disdain. He's probably going to ask her why she isn't already laying prone on the floor and crawling toward him.

"I'm surprised you even came."

Caroline folds her arms, her entire body instinctively wanting to keel over and shield itself away from anything remotely Damon-related.

"I'm not apologizing, and I'm not going to forgive you." Those two things will never happen and it's important that she gets it out of the way first. "Elena wants me to be civil, so I'm being civil. I won't put your crappy personality under a microscope if you stop pretending that I don't have a right to hate you."

She realises how cold she sounds when her voice clips the end of her sentence, but she reminds herself that he doesn't deserve anything softer.

Unaffected by the poison in her tone, he lifts his head, casting a downward glance where the shade of his lashes hides the hypnotising glimmer of his eyes. He says nothing - a cue that they've reached a mutual understanding and she can go back to her life where he holds no value except for being a person that Elena loves.

Caroline spins on her heel, but her exit is interrupted by the sound of his late response.

"You know how there's always that one part of you that just never changes? The part you try to bury so deep that you trick yourself into thinking it's gone until you're at the end of your rope, and suddenly it comes back to bite everyone in the ass?" I know, she frowns, but remains quiet, not quite getting the relevance of his ramble.

"And there's this _one person_ who knows exactly how your ugly little demon self looks like, whether or not you think you've found the path to," Damon tips the glass up and sips, "betterment." Then he smirks at his own dubious use of the word, with slight laziness on the enunciation. "The one person who knows what you really are."

She turns around, but he already has his back facing her. Not brave enough to let her see what his face might reveal.

"My one person isn't Elena."

She shakes her head and keeps the bitter laugh holed up in her chest. He's just drunk, she tells herself, drunk on all his regrets and the bloody memories he has little time and place to revisit with a fond sharp-toothed grin because everyone has some sort of stock in his rehabilitation. (Everyone but her.)

He knows well that he's not going to receive a shred of sympathy, so Caroline isn't sure why he chose to divulge what he did. But long after she's left, the last sliver of his natter has found its way into her heart like a splinter.

_My one person._ The thought travels through her like a shudder, tremulous and quick. _He isn't here._

* * *

_Whitmore College: Omega Delta Phi._

She picks someone to spend a night with.

He's standing about in a smattering of cliques belonging to the frat house. The black wayfarer shape of his glasses is interesting, but it's not what catches her eye - it's his mouth.

His lips are full, so naturally colored that he looks like he could give the perfect kiss. They look all too familiar for her to resist.

_They are a marvel,_ she thinks, as she nips his bottom lip and tightens her hold on his dark blonde hair. He moans into her, hot and needy with fumbling hands. _The only thing missing,_she notes while removing the frames from his face, almost discontent, _is that stupid accent._

Caroline stops him from moving straight into intercourse, offering a playful lick against his pout. "Not yet."

She pulls her shoulders back and he cranes his neck to eagerly take her nipple into his mouth, tongue gently circling - just as she'd imagine he might. Just as, she imagines, _he did_.

There's no better time to feed her fantasy.

Her hand guides his to the crease of her thigh. "Yes," her hiss cuts through the air of his room, as his thumb follows a path to her soft folds. He relishes attention on her other breast and she sighs when he rubs down, fingers using her wetness to create the much-needed glide over her clit - keep going, she encourages, squeezing her eyes shut so her mind starts to see, same shade of mouth and colour of hair, as the tip of his nose nuzzles the apex of her thigh.

_Klaus._ She sees Klaus.

And she still sees him when her eyes are opened again, tongue laving, his middle finger working a fresh flood of desire from her until she feels her walls tighten.

The way his pupils flash a ring of yellow is what adds fire to her blood - oh god, she sits up now, legs responding on their own while he's still dragging his tongue about her in mad patterns - Klaus, her chest heaves the silent prayer, imploding.

"Don't. Stop," she bucks, even though her body begs for pause. Because he wouldn't. He wouldn't let her stop him from sating his lust with so little time between her legs.

The groan rumbles against her thigh in submission, rattling the very centre of her. He plunges his tongue into her cunt, pinning her hips down with both hands, her knees hooked over the domes of his shoulders. She throws her head back to savour his enthusiasm.

That's more like it.

She sobs her pleasure out loud for the second time, her feet becoming tense arches as he slides a calming hand over her and plants a casual kiss on her stomach. Caroline, shaking, asks him again to resume, because no, _he_ will not be done so easily. Klaus will keep going - because he _did_ keep going - until she can only sound out brusque vowels with the delicate O of her petal lips and he's had his fill of her.

His brow furrows, perplexed about the request, but she baits him with dirty promises, that it'll be worth his while. He has to just keep pressing his bruised plum of a mouth to her wet centre and _please please her_, just one more time, so that she can watch him make her come. (Watch… _him_, with his lips glistening and dark, and his gold-black eyes staring straight back at her when she surrenders to him.)

Her partner blinks once, twice, tempted, looking downward to think as his hand starts its own path to her hip, then looks back up where he suddenly finds his gaze locked on to hers, unable to tear away.

"Tell me what you think," Caroline purrs, a knife of guilt twisting in her gut at the unsteady pins of his pupils. "Do you want to?"

He will say yes, because he's not dark enough; too innocent, much too _stable_ for her tastes. His touch isn't a malevolent force that will rip her to shreds. He won't be able to pull the darkness from her soul and weave it into his own. He does not infect her the way the vile emotional spores of Klaus and his mangled intentions both suffocate and send her careening off the precipice of monsterhood.

But Klaus is not here, so this boy will have to do. All she needs is to look at his mouth, and her heart will do the rest of the thinking for her.


End file.
